Hotlinking Protection

Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the addition of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load from your website hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only 2 things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.